This invention relates generally to poultry processing and more particularly to the processing of a poultry foot and leg part to recover the foot.
Poultry is suspended by its legs in a head lowermost position from shackles moved sequentially through the poultry processing plant on the overhead conveyor for killing, scalding, and picking. After the feathers have been picked from the carcass, the legs and feet are separated from the rest of the carcass by separating the hock joint. The leg and foot part remains captivated in the shackles on the overhead conveyor after the hock joint separation and is eventually unloaded from the shackle. Because poultry feet are edible and the demand is high, especially in the Oriental food market, it is desirable to recover the poultry feet from the foot and leg part and skin the separated feet to render them edible. The resulting edible product is sold on a weight basis so it is important to accurately locate the point at which the leg is severed to recover the foot in order to maximize the economic return from the recovered feet. The preferred position at which the leg is severed is about 3/8 inch above the spur on the leg.
One prior art technique used to recover the edible portions of poultry feet is to cut the feet from the legs while the foot and leg parts are still carried in the shackles on the overhead conveyor and then batch process the feet to skin them. This technique is unable to accurately locate the point at which the legs are severed. While the shackles are located relative the cutting knife or saw, the position on the leg at which the shackle engages the leg varies widely once the hock cut has been made to separate the remainder of the carcass from the foot and leg parts. Moreover, the remaining portions of the leg had to be separately removed from the shackle.
Another prior art technique used to recover the edible portions of the poultry feet is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,102,015. This patent discloses a three section piece of equipment; a blanching station, a skinning station, and a severing station through which the foot and leg parts are transported in the picking shackle on the overhead conveyor. The foot and leg parts are first immersed in hot water in the blanching station to heat the skin on the feet and legs to loosen it, then passed through the skinning station where the fingers on skinning rollers remove the skin from the feet and legs, and finally the skinned feet and legs are moved through the severing station where the feet are severed from the legs. Like the prior art technique described above, the remaining portions of the leg are still retained in the shackles and have to be subsequently separately removed.
These prior art techniques are thus not able to accurately locate the position at which the leg is severed to separate the feet resulting in loss of recovery in the weight of the edible product. Moreover, multiple pieces of equipment or multiple stations in the equipment are required to carry out the processing of the foot and leg parts to recover the edible feet thereby keeping the cost of processing high. As a result, poultry processors have had difficulty in economically maintaining a processing operation for poultry feet.